Interrupted Lolla draws 270,000, tying a record

August 05, 2012|By Greg Kot | Tribune music critic

At the Drive-In perform at Lollapalooza in Grant Park Sunday. (Mike Rich/RedEye)

Lollapalooza — which concluded three heat-baked, rain-soaked and increasingly mud-splattered days Sunday in Grant Park — had the attention-grabbling headliners, including most of the original Black Sabbath, the Black Keys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It had gripping performances by rising stars Frank Ocean, the Weeknd and Passion Pit. It featured the biggest show yet by teen South Side hip-hop phenom Chief Keef. And it once again showcased the glittery domination of electronic dance music with overflow crowds for DJs such as Calvin Harris and Bassnectar.

Jack White wrapped up the festival by summing up most of the music that preceded him: surf-into-metal-and-back-again guitar solos, erotic co-ed duets, fiddle and pedal-steel-charged country laments, eerie break-up ballads, twisted blues. And if that weren't enough, Lollapalooza promoters C3 Presents also announced that the festival would expand to a third foreign location next year — Tel Aviv, Israel, joining Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Santiago, Chile.

But the eighth annual gathering of the musical nations, which drew a record-tying 270,000 fans to Grant Park, will always be most remembered as the evacuation festival.

Promoters and city officials pulled the plug on Saturday's parade of music about 3:30 p.m. and ordered the park evacuated in anticipation of a major storm rolling in from the west. More than 60,000 fans and 3,000 festival personnel were evacuated in less than an hour and filled city streets, hotel lobbies, restaurants and bars west of Michigan Avenue while waiting out the storm. The music eventually resumed more than three hours later in the now-swampy park; performances by a half-dozen bands, including the much-anticipated Alabama Shakes, were canceled, the schedule reconfigured and the park curfew ultimately extended by 45 minutes to 10:45 p.m.

A similar storm roared through Lollapalooza last year and the bands played on, notably a rain-drenched set by the Foo Fighters. But promoters this year erred on the side of caution in clearing out the park. There can be little doubt that the weather-related tragedies that befell outdoor concerts last summer had an impact on the decision to evacuate, particularly a stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair that killed seven and injured dozens.

After music resumed Saturday, there were more problems as headliners the Red Hot Chili Peppers took the stage an hour behind the original schedule. Fans already energized by a boisterous set by Calvin Harris at the Perry's stage west of Columbus Drive spilled into the street and down a set of stairs onto Hutchinson Field as the Chili Peppers began, causing a massive human bottleneck. The scene echoed similar crowding issues that befell the main stage areas at both northern and southern extremes in past festivals: squeezing too many people through too-small entry and exit points when extremely popular bands start performing.

Gate crashers, a major issue at last year's festival, when hundreds of people who didn't pay scaled fences or sprinted through entry points, were confronted with increased security this year. A maze of fences and security greeted fans at the main entrances off Michigan Avenue, though at least one gate — at 11th Street — was left open and unattended when the festival reopened after the evacuation.

Saturday's storm left behind a mess of mud and stench-ridden puddles, mostly in the southern portion of the park in front of the main stage. Promoter C3 Presents will be faced with the clean-up bill, with the city in charge of logistics. All parties say they're aiming to have the park back in pristine shape more promptly than last year, when it took months to repair the damage left by the 2011 festival storms.

The music carried on relatively incident-free on the festival's final day. Icelandic band Sigur Ros must've been trying to pretend the brown mounds of goop in front of it were beautiful ice floes as it tried to find the proper mood setting for glacially paced ballads. Gary Clark Jr.re-established his credentials as a guitarist to be reckoned with. He works within a loose blues framework, but he fuses Mississippi hill-country trance rhythms with the modernist flair of Buddy Guy and Jimi Hendrix, his driving solos favoring abrasiveness as much as melody. He was equally impressive dropping the tempo for a slow-dance ballad, complete with falsetto-tinged vocals that could've been heard on a vintage doo-wop single.

At the Drive-In, a Texas quintet reunited after a decade apart, played the main stage and renewed its potent fusion of hardcore punk and progressive rock. The jagged arrangements and hairpin rhythmic turns affirmed the band's staying power, but the decision to put it on the main stage, fenced off from the audience, proved costly. The ferocious give-and-take between band and fans that characterized its vintage concerts was lacking, despite the band's virtuosity.